Dear Colleagues
Before Christmas you were asked to produce an outline of the page spreads that you might wish to include in the Atlas of Ireland. This you did, despite the shortness of time and it was very impressive.
Jim Hourihane collated all of these spreads and sent them to Harper Collins. They had a look at them and responded towards the end of January. Jim’s role in keeping the process going has been crucial and he has now become the main conduit for dialogue with HC.
HC are still interested in the project but they want a lot more information before they finally commit to it. This requires a change in how we anticipated that we would do business and means that we must produce a lot more detail sooner rather than later.
Just to remind us all.
The format of the atlas comprises a series of two-page spreads. We anticipate about 125 or so of these spreads in the atlas. Each spread deals with a theme or themes and will comprise a mixture of maps, text, photos and other graphics but with a firm and clear emphasis on the maps.
They now want us to tell them in some detail what will be on each spread. They need to know the following.
- How many images?
- How many maps will have to be drawn specially for the spread
- How many choropleth maps versus other maps
- How much text versus images.
We will prepare an Excel spreadsheet, which we will upload here, and ask you to fill it in for each of your spreads.
In essence this means that you now need to give some detailed consideration to what your spreads will actually say. In doing this, we would ask you to consider the following.
- HC recognised the academic worthiness of what was proposed but they remind us that they need to appeal to the buying public. So would you please reconsider your spreads from the perspective of both academic importance and public interest. Is there something new that you can add to the mix? For example, in dealing with groundwater, could we include something on polluted sources of drinking water. In dealing with social processes, could we look at the distribution of criminal activity?
- They felt that many of the spreads were too busy. You weret trying to squeeze too much onto two pages. In this regard, you might find the page entitled Sample Page Spreads of use. Here we have some spreads from the recent Irish Times atlas and it gives you an idea of what they think is possible.
- They do not specify font face or size at this point but the same pages will give you a clear indication of what they like to do.
- The emphasis is to be on the images but HC want each spread to begin with a short (<250 words) introduction to what the spread is about. Captions on images can be used to discuss distributions in detail. You may have larger textboxes to discuss the distributions in general terms.
Would you also look at your proposals in the context of what others are proposing to do. We would like you to look for gaps and overlaps. We would encourage you to contact your other theme editors directly to discuss overlaps. Equally, if you perceive a gap would you please make contact with the person dealing with that.
In the next while therefore, we will be asking you to mock-up the pages for your spreads. This is not that we require the materials but more that you supply a sense of how the page will look.
Before you can do this, you need to firm up your list of contributors and this is what I e-mailed you about last week. This raised a number of questions which I will now try to answer. You have been asked to take responsibility for a specific theme with an indicated set of spreads. The intention, however, is not that you will do it all yourself. Rather the intention is that you will ask others in our geographical community to take on individual spreads with you acting as co-ordinator. This serves to spread the net of involvment and ensures that the project is a community one. It also spreads the work and we hope will produce a more rapid response.
We asked for this list of potential contributors by the end of this week and I would be most appreciative if you could do this.
Best wishes
Joe
PS Since this is blogging software, you can post your comments here and we can all see and answer.